AWS is a cloud platform that provides multiple ranges of services to run web applications smoothly. It’s comprehensive and broadly adopted by the industry. It handles web hosting, sells domains, handles load balancing, routing, static file storing, and so on. It provides exceptional web services for clients who want to scale to a worldwide audience and requires a reliable web services provider. But for a growing company and intermediate-level developers, it’s become comparatively hard to choose between AWS and other service providers. So, the question is: Is AWS worth it for growing companies with fewer audiences? And should the new developer increase their AWS skills to get a cost-effective fair deal to make their products up and running? In this article, we are just talking about the hosting service of AWS (up to 2023), but the overall consensus is the same for all services provided by AWS.
As AWS has a large market share which is about 34% in cloud platforms, you don’t have to worry about downtime and failure. AWS is one of the best in business for you to consider.
AWS Products
AWS provides various services to host web applications. Such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Lightsail, and AWS Lambda; all of these are free tier for the first few months, so anyone can learn about them and test them without spending any money.
EC2
For EC2 (Amazon EC2), there are various pricing categories (on-demand, saving, dedicated).
On-Demand
On-demand can be beneficial for new learners, who aren’t sure if they want to use the service further or not. It’ll cost more because the client is demanding the service at the client’s whim.
For the on-demand pricing type, A good performance instance is t3.micro which costs $0.0104/hour ($7.5/month) with 2 GiB memory with 2 vCPU (virtual CPU). For minimal performance, t4g.nano can be used at $0.0042/hour ($3/hour) with 0.5 GiB memory with 2vCPU.
Saving
Reserved instances can be purchased for 1-year or 3-year terms. For one year, the t3.micro will cost $4.75/month. An SSD hard disk can be added to this at an additional price. The Savings category is preferable for growing companies. And also this package is comparable to other hosting providers’ costs.
Dedicated
For the t3 instance, the monthly cost is $4,020.84, which is understandable due to providing multicore multiple instances.
Lightsail
For Linux OS (512 MB Memory, 1 Core Processor, 20 GB SSD Disk, 1 TB Transfer), Lightsail provides a $3.5/month service, which is very cheap and easy to set up. Compared to this with EC2, the user can get a more robust system if he is dedicated to going through the hassle to understand and minimize the cost. But for instant setup Lightsail is the number one competitor to the other hosting services out there.
Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that lets the user run code without any server administration. The user pays according to the number of requests to the server function and function runtime duration. This method of pay-as-use is preferable to those whose server use fluctuates over time.
One expenditure example can be for the first 6 Billion GB-seconds/month $0.0000166667 is charged for every GB-second and $0.20 per 1M requests. This is not a traditional server. So comparing it to other web hosting is not easily comprehensive.
Comparing with Other Products on the Market
We must consider that many parameters must be compared between AWS services and other available hosts to compare truly between the services. For now, we are making surface-level comparisons for the newly growing company to have a proper budget plan.
Hostinger
Hostinger (hostinger.com), provides $1.99/mo (after renewing $3.99) single hosting with 50 GB SSD Storage, 100 GB Bandwidth with some additional facilities such as SSL certification, and managed WordPress. But for single hosting SSH isn’t available, which is a great downside for many developers.
With $2.99/m (after renewing 6.99) one can get premium web hosting with 100 GB SSD Storage, Unlimited Bandwidth.
Even if the overall monthly cost is higher than AWS Lightsail, all the additional facilities provided by Hostinger make it easier to set up and manage the host.
Bluehost
Bluehost (Bluehost) provides $2.95/mo ($9.99/mo after renewing) 10 GB Website space, unlimited bandwidth with standard performance. And with $5.45/mo ($14.99/mo after renewing) 20 GB website space with unlimited websites.
For bandwidth and performance, Bluehost lets the user have unmetered resources. So, the users aren’t billed for the usage and can get a higher resource if the situation demands it. Aside from this feature, the cost of Bluehost can be too much for new developers and growing companies.
In conclusion, AWS lets the user micro-manage his available resources and overall the user can create an optimized version to have a lower cost. But the new users can feel overwhelmed with all the parameters to maintain. For this, other resources besides AWS, help the user to set up with minimum effort and costs a bit more than AWS.
Overall, if the client has enough experience with AWS, then AWS web hosting is recommended due to its low cost. But this is also true that the developer with AWS experience will cost more for the company increasing the overall cost. In the case of not having AWS experience, the other web host services are much better suited to test out the initial products, even if the cost is higher than AWS.
